Lawless has established a successful Subiaco cooking school in the five years since becoming the television series' winning chef and will wage war on ordinary service and mediocre surroundings when he opens Kitsch, an Asian-inspired Leederville bar, in about seven weeks.

He said Kitsch's decor, featuring items from a recent trip to Bangkok, would be grungy and bad taste but kind of cool. There would not be any suburbia-style water features in sight.

"It's a bit more bohemian, a bit more interesting," Lawless said. "Unfortunately, most of the bars and restaurants here look as though Jamie Durie did the fit-out.

"You look at it and go, 'Oh that's nice - for me house!' People can do what they like but for me I don't want that, I want people to either love it or hate it, not just think it's all right."

While nervous about his new role as owner and manager, he was relishing being in control and looked forward to handing over the chef's hat to former Room Nineteen colleague Annita Potter.

He wanted a Melbourne-style bar with a small but constantly changing wine menu and a range of interesting, bite-sized Asian dishes, such as crispy pancakes with coconut and palm sugar-simmered prawns and fried salmon with watermelon and roasted shallots in a chilli and lime dressing.

Lawless said the lack of mutual respect between Perth bar staff and customers drove him mad.

"There's a lot of people here who think they're a bit too cool for school for my liking and I'm sure they think the public don't notice it," he said.

"They'll judge you on buying a cheap bottle of wine . . . you see it in their eyes, they're going, 'That's the wine you're having and you're only having one entree? For God's sake, piss off'.

"It drives me bananas! I don't care if you sit there for four hours and have a glass of wine between you."